Reading Books In 2024: The Best Apps For Reading, Away From Your Paperback Library Collection
Read More, Know More & Finish More Books With These Must Have Apps In 2024
There’s an inherent vibe & feeling about sitting with a book and just drifting away into it & its sweet revelations, while some smooth music plays on your bookshelf hi-fi system as the rain pours down on a monsoon night wherever you are. It’s summer in India right now, and I’m not much of a summer person, but of course, summers are the opposite of the first picture I described especially sunshine vs rainy blue, which also call for books of different genres and moods.
It’s building up to be that kind of summer where you can spend a day in the park or on a beachfront with your family and just skim through your latest read & enjoy some sandwiches and coffee or Diet Coke.
If you like to read but don’t read nearly as much as you would like to, this piece is a bit of a life hack (I guess) — something that works for me after trying out several book apps. This bit of advice in this article is about the best way to diversify the way you read books using tech companies’ mobile apps that are paving the way for people to do so. It’s basically what works for me, but after a bit of reflection, it’s something I thought would work for & benefit a lot of people.
Sitting with a nice hardcover or paperback is lovely, but as our attention spans reduce y-o-y, it’s become a rather dwindling luxury. Basically, you want to get to the meat of things and the main talking points of the books you read or read long & elaborate stories with their twists and turns with lesser effort. So I have bifurcated this post into my top 2 apps available on Google Play or the Apple App Store for mobile, right now, for specific kinds of books & ways to read them, away from your hardcover/paperback library of course.
Audiobooking It On Audible
Firstly, let’s give technology its rightful plaudits as a tool and means of sharing and spreading ideas, stories, and knowledge and in turn helping the human race evolve/grow/progress (your word of choice)….. one book at a time.
Audiobooks are one of the best ways to consume books on the go these days. So my first suggestion is an audiobook app called Audible. It’s an Amazon-owned audiobook company that’s got a plethora of titles available to listen to; almost everything under the Amazon sun.
With the growing popularity of podcasts & just the way audio is being used to share stories, ideas & perspectives these days, YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts et al, Audible is your one-stop destination for consuming books and podcasts.
With a monthly Audible membership, you get credits to purchase any bestseller or basically any book every month. You get 1 credit every month and can buy a book as each month progresses.
The way I use Audible is mainly for reading fiction, history and literary classics, and biographies & books about philosophy or economics.
My current reads are fiction mainly: Shantaram (part II): The Mountain Shadow by Gregory David Roberts, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground & a few others.
Roberts’ first Shantaram book was one of my favourite reads from my late teens so I had to pick up the sequel while I stumbled upon some recommendations of Dostoevsky’s work in a blog post I read online while my sister recommended a few.
In my experience, the books take way more than a month to finish while listening to them on Audible. Eg: Shantaram 2 takes over 38-40 hours of audio to finish. So, especially if the books you’re reading are lengthy books, it’s well worth the subscription.
To quote Audible’s pricing page: “Your membership commences when your order is processed and will renew automatically each month at ₹199 (or after the free trial expires), unless you cancel. Your plan gives you one credit each month, which you can use on any audiobook regardless of length or price. You can roll over any unused membership credits for up to five months.”
While you can use audiobooks for any kind of book per se, I like to use audiobooks for mainly stories, fiction & philosophy. They can be listened to on-the-go on your earbuds, or in a place with a nice view, so it’s really great as your imagination drifts off into the themes & plotlines being narrated with a nice view. It’s great to just drift off into the story as you sit at a scenic location by yourself — tried and tested.
Self-Help Books In Summaries Using Headway
For self-help and productivity books, you need the main points and ideas discussed to remain in your head or to at least keep a note of. You know like remember them so you can implement them, and keep getting back to them from time to time. So for self-help books, (insert George Carlin’s rant here), I prefer this other book summary app called Headway.
With Headway you get every brilliant self-help and productivity book out in the market summarised into concise bullet points and paragraphs in 10-15 minute reads per book. You can also save and highlight the text you want to remember which then gets saved in your library section under each separate book. You can also listen to the summary on audio!
So it’s got a lot of great features all wrapped into one.
Headway is great if you want to read a lot of different books really quickly to learn more and grow, from finance to business, growth, spirituality & all areas of self-improvement & development and you can keep getting back to all the text you saved at any time.
I’ve written a detailed post about using Headway sometime towards the end of last year, as my top productivity & learning app of 2023 which you can check out below…..
At the time of writing this piece, I’ve read over 50+ books & there’s been so much I’ve learned thanks to the app & its brilliant bullet point book summaries.
Headway has varied pricing worldwide but costs around $8.99 a week, $14.99 a month, $29.99 for 3 months or $89.99 a year. However, pricing can vary from region to region globally.
But here’s some great news! You can buy a 3-month subscription for a 36% discount by clicking the link below and using the code: GAURAV24
https://headway-product.com/start-new-promo?promocode=GAURAV24
Just click the link above & enter the code GAURAV24 at checkout & you’ll have to pay only $20.99 for a 3-month subscription! You can test it out, get a feel of the app & see if you like it & its features & then decide whether you’d like to extend your subscription.
This is just a brief description of how I use these two brilliant apps, and they’ve been newer discoveries for me since I got Headway late last year and Audible earlier this year. But they’ve been great so far and I thought sharing this would help a lot of people.
Of course, you can mix and match and use these apps the way you like. But this is how I use them and how they work for me. I’m not much of an eBook/Kindle person although I do have a few eBooks like Brian Eno’s book “A Year With Swollen Appendices” & Ken Follet’s “Night Over Water” but I find that these apps save me a lot of time and effort and help me learn & reflect on ideas, themes and listen to stories from the greatest authors throughout history.
I hope you give them a spin & try it out yourself.
I’m currently writing my first full-length book after releasing a couple of poetry books over the past two years. So stay tuned for that as well.
You can buy my poetry books linked below:
The Indian Night: https://amzn.in/d/bwiQ3jl
Interludes To The Indian Buddha: https://amzn.in/d/7wXWQSR
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